She's been gone nearly three months and with the sale of their house only a couple of weeks away, he's already packed everything but "her" drawer in the kitchen. The bedroom, her closet, her bathroom, have been quick, mindless. In an afternoon, he's stuffed the clothing into the largest black trash bags he can find and called for a pickup. With the exception of her shoes, the local synagogue will take everything wearable including the extra head scarves she hadn't even had the time to un-tag. He's emptied her medicine cabinet of its unsuccessful cures, useless ointments, and a plethora of prescriptions more valuable than their mortgage. He's saved her brush for last; staring at the few remaining hairs from her long black mane that Madame Curie's glow hadn't destroyed.
But he's refrained from packing that one special drawer in the kitchen, the one that has the internal area of a black hole, the place he still considers sacred ground. The drawer he's never opened, always deferring to her knowledge of its contents rather than losing a piece of a nail or ripping tiny chunks of flesh from his fingers in search of something. She knew everything that hid in the drawer, put most of it there to begin with and refused to purge it, even when the drawer would stick because one of the lobster claw crackers had popped into a V and jammed itself against the frame.
It's not out of fear, mind you. He's tough, an ex-Marine, crazy when necessary, a loving husband the rest of the time, even when those times called for the kind of strength that only comes from years of marriage and a commitment to a vow. Her death is the first time he's cried since Iraq. The anger he's unleashed still shows in the fresh plaster and paint in their bedroom where he'd put his fist through the wall after their consultation with the second oncologist. Maybe it was reverence, perhaps it was simply him being stubborn, refusing to accept that she was really gone, but he'd packed everything else in the house in the month after she'd died, leaving this lone kitchen drawer for last.
His first thought is to just yank the entire drawer out in one motion and dump it into the can thus saving him from making contact with the demons that live deep within its bowels. But all the drawers have metal stops in the back and the only way to free one is to first remove all it holds and then release the stop. Danger lurks within and will not be assuaged with an easy fix. His only hope is to eliminate the items one at time, stepping through the landmines on tiptoes with a prayer.
Long ago, he'd given her a baby food jar that he'd found in the backyard of their first apartment house and then filled with odd screws and nuts to put in the drawer. He has every size and shape bolt, screw, and nut that's ever been manufactured in a series of plastic cabinets in the garage, however this jar was for her use in the odd occasion where she'd need to replace a missing screw with a butter knife or shove a small washer under one of the older chairs that's developed a worn leg and is now rocking. In the thirty-two years they'd been married, she'd never opened the jar, calling him instead to resolve any mechanical conflict.
With a shrug, he tosses the jar in the trashcan.
There's a see-through vinyl sewing kit, fully equipped to replace a lost button, albeit with a different color and style, but in an emergency any button is acceptable. The kit still has the price sticker holding the small flap closed. Next to it, he finds his favorite Phillips head screwdriver, its tip now so worn that other than a weapon or pry bar, there's no other job this tool can perform. Pliers with only one leg of yellow rubber insulation come out of the drawer with the end of some butcher's twine stuck in the adjusting notch. The balance of the twine is still too deep in the drawer so he cuts it off with the knife he always carries, slipping the pliers into a back pocket but not before removing the one useless leg of insulation.
A pair of beer bottle openers, "church keys" as she liked to call them, and a corkscrew from the liquor store around the corner from their first apartment, twenty-five years and three other dwellings in the past, are lined up with their business ends jammed against the front of the drawer. Having abandoned the bottle in favor of the bong nearly a decade ago, he sees no need to save the beverage tools and drops them in the trash. He removes several random corks - whole and partial - next in line that follow their metallic counterparts into the garbage.
The collection of lobster claw crackers he'd eventually wrapped with a rubber band to avoid jams begin the newest layer he's reached. He's about to add them to the can, failing to remember the last time he's cooked lobsters at home, but turns and looks at the kitchen table with only two empty chairs, wondering why they still had four claw crackers after all these years.
They'd had the baby discussion dozens of times before they married and all through their first decade as husband and wife. He'd never wanted one. She felt it was their moral obligation to build a future. Because of his love for her, he agreed to have one and only one child. They'd tried a number of times without results and finally she had a miscarriage. He took it as a sign and sealed their future with a vasectomy a few days after their tenth anniversary. However, there existed an uneasy truce about children for many years after that and even some talk - on her part - about adoption.
He pulls a Ziploc bag containing office supplies - paper clips, rubber bands, broken pencils, a capless dried marker, and most of a plastic six-inch ruler - from the drawer and tries to trash it, but an invisible layer of stickiness keeps the bag attached to his fingers and he has to put the garbage can on the floor and use his other hand to pull it free. Upon closer inspection, an open bottle of mucilage reveals itself as the culprit. Retrieving one of the church keys from the trash can, he digs the little bottle of glue out of the drawer and scrapes the dried puddles off the drawer bottom, leaving permanent glue shadows as they pop. One of the translucent yellow teardrops is larger than a quarter and he bends it back and forth several times, sniffing the odd fragrance deeply because it reminds him of the library where they met. He takes his seat at the kitchen table, passing the dried paper cement back and forth under his nose several times before he swallows the growing lump in his throat and wipes the tears from his eyes.
His mother's potato peeler, the one with the wood handle and the bent tip, comes out of the drawer and he puts it into the sink, making a mental note to toss the plastic-handled one that she bought when they moved the last time. He's sure that she said she'd thrown out the old one and remembers digging unsuccessfully through the trash for it at the time. They'd switched to bags of preformed baby carrots and unpeeled potatoes due to his reluctance to use the more modern tool.
The worn and punctured bag of corn prongs comes out next, nearly stabbing his thumb. They'd stopped eating corn on the cob when she read an article on the internet about corn mold and some weird Asian virus that was invading the west coast because of Chinese corn imports. He didn't know they grew corn in China and hadn't had an ear since they'd moved out of New Jersey anyhow. But who knows what the future holds for him. He puts the bag on the counter next to the sink.
There's a small cookbook in the drawer that she'd borrowed from one of their neighbors in South Florida. He can't remember the woman's name, but knows that she'd died last year of the same kind of cancer as his wife. The two women had traveled to Mexico together when her friend adopted and she'd even called him to say there was an extra baby, just to see if he'd changed his mind. He shudders as he remembers the phone call and decides to throw out the book. However, even though he has an adequate collection of his own and the internet provides all the missing links, he knows there's a recipe for something in that particular cookbook that he likes so he lays it on the counter next to the corn prongs.
The further he digs in what seems to be the deepest drawer in the universe, the more useless the items he finds - a pair of baby socks, still with the tag, a gift never used; a glove, hers; numerous loose keys, cashews, a very dried fig, scraps of paper with phone numbers and names he doesn't recognize, receipts from the local supermarket, craft store, a gas station in South Florida where they lived five years ago.
As he reaches the end of the collection, finding one of his missing gloves, he pulls out a heavy red envelope with a brown elastic tie, the kind in which he stores their Wills and important papers. Taking the envelope over to the kitchen table, he eases himself down in the chair, his back arguing too early in the day. Clouds, which weren't supposed to clear until the afternoon, part over his shoulder, letting the sunlight blaze in through the open window. The early spring showers have come and gone. Perhaps her daylilies will bloom.
Carefully, he opens the flap and lays the contents of the envelope out on the table.
His breath sticks in his throat and tears well in the corner of his eyes. Slowly, he counts thirty-two Fathers Day cards, one for each year they were married, one for each year he would have been a father. Each card has a year printed on the front in her handwriting but inside they're blank except for the last one, the card that has the current year, the year she's died.
She's penned a one-line sentence to him and he lets the tears flow down his cheeks as he reads it over and over in choking silence.
"I never gave up hope."
The rest of Ricky's website.